ChinRey

Sassy Romano wrote: Ok that was terrible... Not at all, well said! And for the tech people: The Marketplace software is outdated and no longer compatible with reality. Please update. For board members: It turns out that the Marketplace Department has been unable to reach its optimal performance due to insufficient capacity and outdated solutions. This situation has existed for a while and has caused Linden Lab a significant relative financial loss. There have also been complaints from B2B customers who also suffer financial losses due to this. And finally: Marketplace fungerar inte som den borde och vi måste gjora något drastiskt. (Yes, I know there's a typo there but that's because this message board doesn't allow umlaut characters!!!) I think that should cove all bases. Or did I miss something? ---- Edit: But seriously: Sassy Romano wrote: ...but nothing else works... That's not absolutely true. A question at Lab Chat seems to have some effect. Wjat worries me is that Linden Lab may still believe they can patch up this new search engine, add a few of the things mentioned in those two threads here and be done with it. The problems with Marketplace runs deeper than that, much deeper. If they think they've finished the job after that, I'm afraid I shall have no choice but to start quoting Churchill and that would be sad for everybody.

Sassy Romano wrote: You meant to say "and with improved performance" Pardon my French but you got to speak a language they understand to get your message through. In any case, English has been busy adopting French words ever since 1066 when a Danish expatriot in Normandie decided the grass was greener on the other side of the channel. One more imported word isn't going to make much difference. Besides, "performant enough" actually has far more semantic meaning that the word "performant" on its own.

Pamela Galli wrote: (Pardon my lack of excitement.) We'll let it pass this time.

I'm a bit surprised this hasn't been mentioned here yet. Am I the only one who have noticed that we are now redirected to the right page when we log on to the forum? /me opens her copy of "Low hanging fruits LL should have picked up long ago" and deletes one item from the list.

I know this sounds like a very negative subject. But I'd like to explain to those here who don't realize yet what all those complaints from merchants are all about and also maybe even explain why it doesn't generate nearly as much income, neither for Linden Lab nor the merchants as it could and should. I think most of it can be summed up in a single sentence: The Second Life Marketplace is not suitable for BIG It is not suitable for big catalogs. I'm going to use myself as the example for a change. I have about 3000 works I should have listed on MP long ago. The way MP is set up now, I have to expect at least 15 minutes work for each listing if I want a good, professional look with good images, related products listings and all that. That's almost half a year of work just transferring data and files from my computer to MP. Then I have to manage those listings and with the inadequate tools MP offers there (try to chop down a tree with a breadknife) that too is a nightmare. And it gets exponentially worse. Double the number of listings and managing them becomes ten times as hard. (Edit: yes, I know I'm an extreme example here but I'm certainly not the only one to keep sellable products away from MP simply because adding and maintaining the listings would be far too much work.) It is not suitable for big sales volumes. Tech Robonaught brought up one of the issues in the thread More Redelivery Options needed Heads up Marketplace Team but redlivery is really just the tip of the iceberg. The Marketplace offers no adequate functions to track past sales and sales results. It is not suitable for big earners. In an interview at hypergridbusiness.com Ebbe Altberg mentioned that a well known maker of mesh body parts made "hundreds of thousands of dollars." That's good for her and I'm sure LL is very happy about the 5% they get from her MP sales. What Ebbe didn't mention, and possibly didn't even know, is that there are four makers of mesh body parts with sales figures in that order. One of them may even be bigger than his example. But the other three do not list their products on the Marketplace, they only sell at their inworld stores. The reason is easy to see. If you have a product lots of people really want: Rez a primSet it up as a vendor and place it in a nice placePost messages about it in a few groups and blogsMuch cheaper and much faster than an MP listing and it does the same job. There's been some talk about LL's 5% commission on MP sales recently. In cases like these 1% would have been to much. It simply wouldn't be worth it for them. It is not suitable for big buyers. Shopping cart can only hold ten items. You can store favorite listings but not favorite stores. Viewing transaction history is easier for the buyer than for the seller but only in the same way a tortoise is faster than a snail. One of the stated goals of the Marketplace Search Beta is to make the search "scale better as more content and categories are added to the Marketplace". That is good of course but it will only have limited effect on its own because a chain is only as strong as the weakest link. Every single function, every single line of code in the software, will need to be upgraded to become robust and performant (sorry Sassy) enough to handle the size MP has grown to. Three questions to Linden Lab in case anybody there reads this and is willing and able to answer: Do you realize how much work is needed to repair MP? Are you prepared to do that job? And do you have a roadmap for it?

Sassy Romano wrote: There is NO need for threads making MP suggestions, we do this over and over ad nauseum and yet strangely expect a different result each time. We did get a different result with the search engine beta... ... ... ... ... ... Eventually. We have named Lindens respoding to user feedback now. And I mean actually responding, not just posting meangless clichés. And they are actually trying to fix it before they release it. That is definitely something new. Way to early to say if anything good will come out of it of course, but different, yes, definitely! In any case, even if this turns out to be the end of the DAMP (Dark Ages of MarketPlace), recovery is going to be painfully slow, Redelivery system and a proper transaction hisory? It won't happen this year and not too early next year either.

If you have problems like that, please contact Linden Lab at: https://support.secondlife.com/contact-support/ Nobody on this forum are able to check it or help you with it since nobody here works at SL/LL, we're all just regular users just as you are.

Rolig gave the answer but I think we also should clear up a misunderstanding: This is not an "official" Second Life supprot forum. Nobody working for Second Life/Linden Lab ever replies here. Everybody ehre are users just like you are, trying our best to help each other. If yoiu need to contact Linden Lab, you can do that at the "Contact Support" page: https://support.secondlife.com/contact-support/

I can't help you sorting out the bug of course but maybe a way to work around it: When you buy land, put it up for sale again immediately, either set it for sale to yourself onoy or set the price so high that it'll make you smile rather than frown if anybody actually buys. The theory is of course that this new sale setting will override the old one. Don't know if it'll work but it may be worth a try.

Oz Linden wrote: Ok. We get that you would like demo items excluded from search. We can't do that immediately, but we get it. You can all stop repeating that now, and really we don't need 30 point bold type for anything. Sorry to hear you feel that way, Oz. But you have to understand - as Sassy so subtly hinted at - that this is hardly something new. Merchants have requested, suggested and even begged for this change for years now and when Linden Lab posts a reply where they don't even seem to understand what it's about, there's no wonder people need to vent their frustration. Now, this project went off to a bad start, and it certainly wasn't the right one to start with anyway, But now that it seems to be on track, the best thing to do is to finish it and let all the other issues wait.' Don't let it stop there though. There are so many problems with MP that should have been fixed years ago and one isolated upgrade isn't going to make that much difference to the big picture. You'll have to keep on delivering. And it's going to be really tough. Many merchants have been banging their heads against the wall for so long now they simply can't believe there's finally a hope for a breakthrough.

Drake1 Nightfire wrote: ... and acting as if everyone should give them free things. ... Ummm.... see my previous post for reply

Amethyst Jetaime wrote: ...cheesy pickup lines out of the blue... You're not suggesting only newbies use those, do you?

Dakota Linden wrote: Keyword Spam violates the Marketplace Listing Guidelines. Anyone aware of keyword spam on a product listing is strongly encouraged to report the listing so that the issue can be addressed with the seller as quickly as possible. That's good to hear. But the questions are: 1. Do you have the capacity to deal with the problem? It's not uncommon when you do a search on MP to get a list of hundreds of irrelevant keyword spam listings. I think I better use an example not related to my own store. Let's say you want a texture kit for yout lovely Pacha sailboat. A search for Pacha on MP brings up 652 hits. Most of them are from a store named Pacha - illustrating the issue with store names being included in search. Oh well. Let's narrow it down a bit and search for Pacha texture kit. That helps of course. But on the first page you still have one texture kit for Pacha's main competitor, Bandit B60 and you even have two planes there! Look at the source code for those listing and yes, they have Pacha in the keyword field even though they have no relevance whatsoever to anything called Pacha. I chose that example because I happen to know that these listings have been flagged several times by several people. They're still there. 2. When a listing is flagged for keyword spam, do you know what to look for? That's a genuine question btw. In my first post in the old thread I used Medieval Stable as the test search. I didn't flag any of the keyword spam listings then for obvious reasons but if I had, would you have known that the words medieval and stable were what you needed to look for or would you have had to check each and every keyword for each and every of the several hundred flagged listings? 3. Do you have good enough security measures to protect merchants from being delisted because of accidental keyword spamming? I suppose you're well aware of the autofill bug by now - where keywords from the source listing may be retained in the new lsiting without the merchant knowing about it. What do you do when you come across cases like that?

irihapeti wrote: 3) a free Sansar bear Or even better: free Sansar beer!

Tara Prasinos wrote: I'd love to be able to "refine search" by looking for "Mesh only" or "No Mesh". Mesh has become such an important part of items that it should be a search criteria. My two cents. That should be relatively easy to implement. All items are already flagged as "No mesh", "Partial mesh" and "100% Mesh" so the search engine only needs to look for those flags. I do have mixed feelings about it though. It's definitely in my own best interest to give searchers that option. I make mostly mesh myself so it would increase the average search ranking of most of my products and yes, it can be very valuable if used right. But there are two problems: Today lots of builders/merchants use mesh for builds where prims (or even sculpts) would have been far more suitable. This is either because they know mesh sells or because they don't understand buiding well enough. With the current lag issues in SL, do we really want to encourage the "mesh for mesh' sake" trend? The mesh flag is wide open to abuse. The moment it becomes a search criterium dishonest sellers (and yes, they do exists, believe it or not) might well start listing their products as mesh even if they aren't. How are we going to keep that under control?

Linden Lab wrote: As part of our continued work on the Marketplace Beta Search, we’ve made changes to the Beta that some of you have already noticed. Now we're talking! I don't really have time to test the new version right now but a few general comments: Linden Lab wrote: * An important feature in Beta Search is a learning algorithm that, for example, adjusts ranking based on conversions - which means search results will improve over time with real sales data in a more consistent way than sales rank provided in the past. Yes, that can be potentially very valuable. I didn't dare mention it before since I was afraid it would be a bit too complicated to implement and the last thing we need right now is more complications. Linden Lab wrote: Demo listings as a separate category Darrius and polysail have already mentioned this but to elaborate a bit: The purpose of this porject is of course to improve the quality of the search results. The by far two most effective ways to do that, would be to eliminate demos from general search and to clean up the extensive keyword spam. Those two issues are the reasons for far more than ninety percent of the search result related problems in the current MP. The biggest of those two problems, keyword spam, is clearly outside the scope of this project so we have to leave that for now (although I hope LL will give it top priority as soon as this has been implemented). Demos, however, shouldn't be and it shoudn't be too hard to implement a solution either. Polysail has already suggested one approach (except: name the checkbox "Include demos", place it among the other filtering options at the left column of the web page and have it unchecked by default). But there is a more effective way to do it and it should be even easier to implement: All demos are flagged as such in the database. They have to be for them to be linked to the main product. All that's really needed is to add a function to the search engine that looks for that flag and excludes listings that have it. Exactly the same applies to listings that are flagged as unavailable of course. They are not nearly as big a problem as demos but if you can make a filtering routine for the demos, it should be very easy to us the same solution to exclude expired listings too, just have the search engine check if the listing is flagged as "Unavailable" and is it is, remove it from the search results list. Linden Lab wrote: Grouping similar listings in different colors It's not just colors. There are lots of reasons why a merchant might want to offer several almost but not quite identical poducts for sale. But yes, that's definitely not something you should try to handle right now. It's a huge project on its own. Linden Lab wrote: Please give the Marketplace Beta Search another whirl and let us know of any issues you encounter with the new features listed above. As I said, I haven't got time right now. But you did remember to kill that annoying autofill function, didn't you?

irihapeti wrote: i was reading the notes Canary Beck made on the Lab Chat show (Drax Files) with Ebbe Linden is here the notes: http://www.canarybeck.com/2015/11/20/the-linden-lab-chat-summarised-in-7-minutes/ Better be a bit careful there. Canary Beck's notes are so simplified they can be highly misleading. Not her fault I have to say, you can't avoid serious data loss when you try to compress 94 minutes into 7. Here's the whole show: http://draxfiles.com/2015/11/20/show-95-lab-chat/

Chic Aeon wrote: Well according to the TOS of August 2013 and not changed in any manner I have heard of since then open source is not supposed to be uploaded as the uploading person in this case does NOT hold the copyright. In other words, if it wasn't for that physical center bug this feature would only have been useful for people to violate Linden Lab's TOS. Didn't think about that but you're right of course. (I probably should have added an emoticon here but I'm not sure which would be the most appropriate.) Chic Aeon wrote: As I was working on a fairly complex object in Blender cycles today I noted that if you want to use the full extent (well, as much as I know anyway) of Cycles then there could certainly be occassions when you would need more than eight materials. You can of course work around that and I have, I suppose the workaround is to map several Blender materials onto a single UV map/texture. That would make sense. Chic Aeon wrote: I will keep it to eight though and just upload in pieces as I have before. Enough new stuff in this project as it is. It shouldn't be that much of a problem I hope. Remember that weight balancing is one of the most important tools we have to keep LI down and that means it rarely make sense to combine so many materials into a single mesh anyway. Of course, one important exception would be if you have a moving part that needs more than eight faces and should be linked to a static object. I suppose rez boxes still have their place in modern SL building.

Darrius Gothly wrote: Regardless of who put the key in the ignition, who fired up tthe engine or who put it in gear, he's the one at the wheel now. Any deviation into ditches, potholes or off cliffs won't blow back to the key guy, the engine guy or the gear guy. So yeah .. it's Ebbe's Project .. now. You means he's accountable for what his predecessors and employees do too? Now, who gave you such a crazy idea???

Darrius Gothly wrote Ebbe faces a giant challenge. His Project Sansar... Just to avoid a possible misunderstanding here: Sansar is not really "Ebbe's project." It was started long before he became the CEO of LL:

Zeresy wrote: Hi, not sure if this is in the right category or not. Probably not but nobody's complained yet. Zeresy wrote: I have the Dawn Kingdoms Mesh avatars by Wanders Nowhere, and no matter which one I try to right click on, I can't right click on it. I don't know that particular mesh avatar but you can't right-click to edit fitted mesh while you're wearing it. You may be able to get around it by first tyiping ctrl-3 to open the edit weindow and then left-click on your avatar. It probably won't fo much good though because there's not much editing you can do with fitted mesh. You can't change the size and you can't change the position. You can of course change texture and tinting but those functions should be available through a HUD anyway. Zeresy wrote: If anyone can help me, I'd be very grateful! I want to be able to customize my avatar, which of course, requires that I get to the "edit" option for it.. No it doesn't. Nearly all avatar customisation is done through the Appearance window or even directly from inventory. It's only on some very rare special cases you want to edit items while you're wearing them.

Sassy Romano wrote: Not quite. It's not what he knows that matters but what he does with the information. That remains to be seen of course.

Darrius Gothly wrote: Considering that #2 above would require not only a bit of technical magic to make everyone at the talk think it was "live", but it would also require stand-up folks like Jo be in on the deceit .. I would also have had to be in it, it was a reply to one of my questions at the session. And since my question was a direct result of this thread, it would have taken a bit of clairvoyance to pre-record it too. Darrius Gothly wrote: When you consider that Linden Lab has two main web sites with customer sales and monies involved .. and the Marketplace is one of them .. is it really "okay" for the CEO to have no clue how things are going? Or what things are going? Oh, he was definitely uncomfortable with the question, no doubt about that. That means he wasn't aware of the situation until very recently, no doubt about that either - I have to agree that is a bit worrying. He does know now though and that's what really matters.

Chic Aeon wrote: Now aren't you all glad I brought this up? Yes. Chic Aeon wrote: And I do agree that it seems to accommodate the illegal (remember we all took that uploader test and signed the TOS a few times) importing of free to use web mesh. Not sure what you mean by illegal. Yes, there is a lot of mesh uploaded by people who clearly didn't make the items themselves, probably don't know how to make mesh themselves, and unfortunately don't know how to make mesh work in SL. But I'm sure it's all open soruce, public domain items or items where the creators have given explicit permission. Anybody who tries to sell illegal content in SL will have the LL SWAT team dropping on their head like a ton of prims before they can ssay "Level Of Detail".

Pamela Galli wrote: Here is a summary, not his exact words: http://www.canarybeck.com/2015/11/20/the-linden-lab-chat-summarised-in-7-minutes/ Thank you. It's not quite as bad as you thought, Pamela. Here's a recording of the entire show: http://draxfiles.com/2015/11/20/show-95-lab-chat/ The MP question starts exactly at 00:25:00